The World’s Smallest Pasta Is Not Very Tasty

Chemists searching for better bandages make the world’s smallest paste

Who Ben Guarino edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

The most curved pasta ever made – let’s call it “nanotini” – has an average diameter of 372 nanometers and only two ingredients: flour plus formic acid. The latter, a caustic agent usually sprayed by disturbed ants, is why researcher Adam Clancy sniffed his creation before eating it.

In general, it is not advisable to consume things pickled with formic acid. But Clancy, a chemist at University College London, relied on his understanding of the acid’s odor threshold, the lowest concentration at which the human nose can detect a substance. Clancy believed that if the paste was odorless it was too low in acid to be dangerous. Satisfied, he chewed a piece of nanotini. “I know you’re not one for self-experimentation, but I made the smallest pasta in the world,” says Clancy. “I couldn’t hold back.”

Clancy and his co-authors recently published their pasta recipe In Nanoscale Advancesthey are not trying to cook something for Italian restaurants; starch nanofibers are being investigated for their potential as next-generation bandages. The mats of these fibers have pores that allow water to pass through, but are too small for bacteria, Clancy says.

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Ideal wound dressings are not simple barriers. They should also speed recovery, said Mohsen Alishahi, a graduate student at Cornell University examines nanofiber bandages made with starch derivatives and was not involved in the nanotini project. “Using a natural material like starch to develop a wound dressing can help the wound heal faster,” Alishahi says. Starch should promote the growth of cells around an injury because the fibers resemble the body’s microscopic structural network, called the extracellular matrix. And starch has another natural advantage: made by all green plant species, it is one of the most common organic compounds on the planet.

Previous nanofibers were constructed from purified corn, corn, and rice starch. This is the first time anyone has made it with plain white flour; thus, Clancy says, it meets the definition of the world’s smallest pasta. To do this, his team first dissolved the flour in acid, which loosened the starch clusters in the flour, allowing the molecules to bind to the leather.

This was followed by a delicate warm-up and cool-down sequence lasting hours. This process is the “most interesting” aspect of the new research, says Pennsylvania State University food scientist Greg Ziegler, who is studying starch nanofibers as a possible scaffold. meat seeds and was not involved with the new role. Despite the impurities in supermarket flour, the resulting liquid had “just the right viscosity for kneading,” says Ziegler, referring to the technique used to make pasta.

Pasta makers usually slice the dough or punch it through small holes to shape it. But in this case it was starch molecules electrocution—electric charge drawn through a hollow needle tip. The liquid came out of the needle horizontally, attracted to a plate a few centimeters above the ground. As the acid dried rapidly in flight, the starch chains formed strong but invisible threads; their width was too small to see with the naked eye. What could be seen were the white mats that were formed by the accumulation of fibers on the plate. These folded mats looked a little like paper, but instead of being wood pulp, it was a very small paste. As for the taste? “I can confirm that it needs some seasoning,” says Clancy.